Saints And Shadows
by turbomagnus
Summary: The Saints' calling brings their paths across that of The Shadow's mission.


Author's Note: The 365 Project is an experimental _multi-fandom_ project to write and post at least one short every day for the next year, not including my semi-regular bi-weekly updates. For more details, see the relevent section in my profile. This is The 365 Project, 18 August.

In the immortal words of Samuel L. Clemens... "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR."

Disclaimer: "The Shadow" belongs to Street and Smith Publications and is used for entertainment purposes without permission or intent to profit. "The Boondock Saints" belongs to 20th Century Fox, Franchise Pictures and Troy Duffy. Yes, I know the Saints are from the nineties/00's and The Shadow was in the thirties, but the encounter was too intriguing an idea to pass up when I had it...

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"Saints And Shadows"  
By J.T. Magnus, 'Turbo'

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Life is full of little ironys; like the fact that there was a Mexican standoff happening and South Boston was nowhere near Mexico - two men each had a gun pointed at a third and the third had a gun in each hand pointed at the two. To fully understand the situation, one would have to go back in time...

-o0o-

He had worn many names, many guises, but only one of those was the one known to strike fear deep into the hardest of hearts in the criminal underworld; _The Shadow_. The others existed only as part of The Shadow's mission; Kent Allard, Henri Arnaud, Lamont Cranston and countless others were only parts of the man that had become the scourge of New York City's criminal element. If any of them were the identity with which The Shadow had been first born, no one knew, not even the most trusted of his Agents. He was currently lurking in the shadows of a warehouse on the south side of Boston, watching a meeting between two groups of mobsters, waiting to prove a point; the mill of the Gods ground slowly, but it ground exceedingly small, being headquartered in Boston would not save them from his wrath for trying to move their operations into New York. After all, shadows were everywhere.

Of those two groups meeting, one was the expanding group, the one seeking to gain a foothold in new territory. The other group was the opportunist group, the group that saw funding the other's expansion as a way to get a foothold in some of the areas that the expanding group controlled at the moment. The Shadow saw the meeting as a way to deal with two groups of criminals at one time, before either of them could develop the footholds they were planning to establish. An agreement had just been reached and the leaders of the two groups were shaking hands when a chilling laughter began to echo throughout the warehouse.

"What the hell is that?"

"The Shadow, man, it's The Shadow."

"It can't be The Shadow, you idiot! He's in New York!"

"And where were we moving to, huh? He _knows_, they say he _knows_!"

"Get yourself together, there's no such thing as The Shadow, it's probably just some cop trying to scare us," the leader of one of the groups snapped, pulling his gun and firing a few rounds into the darkness, "How do you like that, huh, cop?"

The laughter only grew louder, then a voice boomed off the walls of the warehouse, assaulting the two groups from every side.

_"No such thing as The Shadow, Salvatore Dingliari? Your own fear says otherwise."_

Another burst of laughter was marked by the shattering of every lightbulb in the warehouse, leaving only the headlamps of the two cars that the groups had arrived in and the moonlight streaming in through the windows as illumination, not that they provided much of it. At one end of the warehouse, the light seemed to fly away as though in fear of what was there, the sudden blackness drawing the criminals' attention for them to watch as a man seemed to grow in form out of the darkness, blood red scarf around his lower face the only break between black slouch hat and black cloak.

The figure, The Shadow, reached under his cloak and drew forth a pair of nickel-plated .45 Colts to point them at the gathering of criminals, his voice carrying throughout the warehouse despite not being raised when he spoke, "The Shadow _knows_..."

All of the criminals' attention was focused on The Shadow until the loading door at the other end of the warehouse exploded inward as a black van came into the building backwards. The van screeched to a stop and almost immediately the back doors burst open disgorging two men followed seconds later by a third. All three of them drew pistols and pointed them at the two groups of criminals who were now torn as to where they should focus their attention.

One of the three looked towards the other end of the warehouse where The Shadow stood, then let his eyes drift back to the group in the middle appraisingly, "He's redeeming himself... the rest o' them go."

Before the sound of the last syllable finished fading away, all hell broke loose.

-o0o-

By the time the sounds of gunfire were nothing but echos, only one of the gangsters was still alive. In a moment of fitful intelligence, Salvatore Dingliari concluded that his odds were better with one guy than with three and took off running towards The Shadow, dropping to his knees and grabbing the vigilante's cloak.

"I'll turn myself in! I'll go to jail! You gotta protect me!"

Smoothly holstering his .45's, The Shadow pulled Dingliari's hands from his cloak and lifted him by his wrists.

"The weed of crime bares bitter fruit, Salvatore Dingliari," The Shadow observed, then threw him back towards the other three shooters.

Two of the men split, one to each side, to lift Dingliari up and put him onto his knees, the third was standing behind him and his pistol was pointed at the mobster's head.

"At least die with some dignity, Ding-a-ling," one of the men to the side snapped harshly, "It won't change where you're goin', but at least it sounds better when you're standing before the Lord."

"Aye," the man standing to the other side agreed, "Better that on your headstone than 'he died sniveling unlike the men he'd killed'."

"Come on, what do you want? Money, I can get you money! Women? Drugs? Guns, you seem like the type that likes guns," Dingliari bargained for his life.

"What we want is for you to face the justice you've managed to avoid," the man behind him replied as the other two moved to flank him, putting their own pistols to Dingliari's head before all three began reciting a prayer.

"And Shepards we shall be, for Thee, our Lord, for Thee, the power hath descended from Thy hand, that our feet may swiftly carry out Your command, and we shall flow a river unto Thee, and teeming with souls shall it ever be..."

"In nomen Patri," the one in the middle continued.

"Et Fili," the one on the right said.

"Et Spiritus Sancti," the one on the left finished, the sign for all three to pull the trigger, and Salvatore Dingliari fell to the floor dead.

Two nickel-plated .45's made their reappearance and were pointed at the two men on the flanks.

"Why are you here?" The Shadow demanded.

"Like you said, 'the weed of crime'," one of the men answered, "Gardeners, you might call us. Like a gardener plucks weeds so that flowers may grow..."

"We do the work the Lord has called us to; to destroy that which is evil so that which is good may flourish," the other continued.

"You, I can see it in your eyes, you know of what we speak," the first one added, "You know the evil that lurks in the hearts of men."

"You've done things as bad as any of these," the second one gestured towards the dead, "But you've seen the wrong you've done and you work to balance the scales."

"You're not a Saint," the first one finished, "But you do His work same as us. Our paths just happened to cross."

"He works in mysterious ways," the second agreed, "And as long as men like this exist, I expect there to be work enough for all of us..."

As though at some unseen, unheard signal, all three men lowered their guns and The Shadow nodded before taking a step back into the darkness and disappearing.

"Man, what the hell was that?" the third man asked, "Seriously, I can handle that freaky 'seeing evil' thing you two do, but vanishing vigilantes? What the hell, man? I mean... hell!"

Ignoring the third man's rant, the second man turned to the first and smirked, "And you said The Shadow was some kind of damn urban legend - some legend, huh?"


End file.
